Introduction

Abstract

This introductory chapter begins with a partial health warning: for readers in the main metropolitan centres of Europe, this book is going to provide a somewhat strange and often disconcerting account of student mobility; for those familiar with the lives of tertiary-educated young people in peripheral societies and their need to be mobile, there will be no such difficulties. This is a discussion that takes as its research foci university-educated young people in three different societies, each of which is characterized by its own peculiar social, economic and political limitations; limitations that mean international mobility is, at least for many of those with ambition, de rigueur in order to successfully reach personal and professional goals. In this sense, this is a study of student mobility in contexts where such movement is of fundamental importance to finding a position in society rather than being an additional supplement to enhance an already healthy state of employability.